


Bets Against the Void

by miles_and_miles



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Canon-Typical Violence, Fix-It of Sorts, Kill your double, Multi, Spiral Avatar Sasha James, The Magnus Archives Season 2, The Magnus Archives Season 3, The Magnus Archives Season 4, except jurgen leitner who does very much still die, fair warning it turns out that elias also dies but look he just had to go, this is how the s1 archival staff can still win
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:27:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 16,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26005669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miles_and_miles/pseuds/miles_and_miles
Summary: In a place that doesn't exist behind a door that never was, Sasha James wakes up.And she wants revenge.
Relationships: Helen | The Distortion & Sasha James, Martin Blackwood & Sasha James & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Tim Stoker, Sasha James & Michael | The Distortion
Comments: 98
Kudos: 175





	1. Through the Door

When Sasha opens her eyes, it’s -- it’s two weeks from now? No, that can’t be right, because yesterday is so alive in her mind that it could be happening right now -- coffee and pleasantries and  _ run, Sasha, RUN! _ and somebody’s hand slipping out of hers. But no, that’s not it either. She remembers, so those moments have passed. Yesterday is a prisoner in the kingdom of imagining. So, she supposes, it must be now. 

Time feels... _ everything _ feels strange. 

The hallway in front of her stretches, infinite. Sasha has felt plenty of terror, plenty of revulsion, and her fair share of grief, but she has never known so completely that she is lost. 

She runs.

***

The corridor does not end. She is nowhere. She is everywhere. There are mirrors hanging on the walls. Sasha does not look into them. Sasha _ must not _ look into them.

***

Are any of the others still alive? How many fragments of her heart are lying lifeless on the Archive floor, vacant now but for nestling silvery worms? How many have become something...something  _ worse _ ? 

Sasha trips, stumbles, falls to her knees. If she’d ever been the praying sort, now would be the time. No such luck. The ground beneath her isn’t steady, only cold. 

***

“Oh, Sasha!” 

This voice is familiar! This is someone she knew!-- knows! -- no. Something inside of her sinks, cold and sick. It’s just a voice she's heard before, recognizable for all the wrong reasons. 

She speaks anyway.

“Michael?” She can hear her voice distort, an edge to it like eggshell crunching in your teeth. 

“Of everyone it could've been, I'm rather glad it's you. I did enjoy it, you know, when we met. Do you remember ?” 

She does, but when she reaches for any specific detail it’s like running her hands under a faucet that’s quickly becoming intolerably hot. 

“I get lonely, you know,” Michael continues. “You don’t have to know what you are to know you’re alone.” 

“Stop philosophizing,” Sasha spits through gritted teeth. 

“Don’t be rude,” Michael says, sing-song. He’s moving towards her in the mirrors, but she can’t see anything in the inky darkness. She knows she should want to flee. She doesn’t move. She no longer has it in her. “Clever Sasha, finding me. Clever, clever.” 

“Leave me alone!”

“Oh, you don’t want that.” 

“You don’t know what I want.” 

“Yes, but neither do you.” He laughs, and it is -- it is  _ something _ , echoing off of the forever-walls of a place that isn’t real. Nails on a chalkboard, knife against bone, a scream too far away for help. 

“Where am I?” She searches for breath in a too-tight chest. Whatever she finds only fans fear’s flame, searing her lungs from underneath. 

“That’s not the question, though. Oh, dear, Sasha. What have we gotten ourselves into? That doesn’t even feel like your name anymore, does it?” 

She is sure of at least one thing in the universe: Michael's help is worse than a kick in the knees. 

“Fine, have it your way,” Sasha says. “ _ What _ am I?” 

“She’s such a fast learner!” She wishes he wouldn’t clasp his hands in delight. It’s really quite horrible to look at. 

“What do you want from me?” 

Michael’s face falls, which means that he constructs and deconstructs a reality where there was never a sharp smile stretching between his coiled curtains of sweeping blond hair. “Why does everything have to be so transactional? I don’t want anything from you. I tried to save you!” 

She freezes. “What do you mean?”

“Artifact storage, of course. That table and its pretty, pretty patterns--” 

“No. What do you mean... _ tried _ ?” 

“Oh, it could’ve been worse, don’t get me wrong. The Stranger really wanted you for its own. What a sweet little torment that would've been for the infamous Magnus Institute. What a...poke in the Eye, if you will.” He laughs for what must be twenty years. 

Finally, Sasha slams her fist against the mirror next to her. She watches in the reflection as a strange and twisted hand, the one she is controlling, the one that surely cannot  belong to her, breaks the glass. 

The mirror shatters. When it cuts that wicked hand, she bleeds. 

***

Sasha doesn’t know how long she spent wandering the hallways. She’s not even sure what she was looking for. An escape hatch, a door that would open into a life worn soft and familiar? Maybe. That’s not going to happen, though. She’s convinced of that much. 

She wanders and she learns. Her mind no longer stops where she ends, which is new and different. If she could only find her way back to the Institute, Sasha could tell them so much! She smiles to think about this before remembering that it's fully possible that nothing she’s picked up has been true.  _ Throat of delusion incarnate _ and all that. 

When she finds out that Michael’s been terrorizing Jon, she -- well, it would be safe to say that she flies off of the handle a bit. Michael has been  _ very _ clear that anything human left in her is as good as dead, but certain paths are so well-worn that she cannot forget. Like the winding road of worry that leads to Jon’s weary eyes. Jon admitting that he’s never been brave. Jon, who hates uncertainty and unreality and things that don’t add up. 

Does that mean he’d hate Sasha, now, too? 

When she threatens to break every bone-that-isn’t-a-bone in Michael’s hands over his visits to the Institute, he’s infuriatingly unrattled. 

“Don’t most people hate their bosses?” he asks innocently. 

“He’s my  _ friend _ ,” Sasha says.

“He doesn’t care about you,” laughs Michael. “He didn’t even notice that...oh.  _ Oh _ . You don’t know, do you?” 

She can’t stand when he acts like he knows something she doesn’t, so she watches the archives through a door left ajar. There is a stranger who reeks of cobwebs and treachery, and everyone who loved Sasha best calls it by her name. It offers half-baked constructive criticism on Martin’s poetry and promises Tim that the constellation of scars Jane Prentiss’s worms left across his face doesn't look as strange as he thinks. When the creature rests its head on Tim's shoulder, Sasha is sure it looks right at her. A hungry, knowing smile spreads over that unfamiliar face. Sasha’s fingers curl into equilateral triangles, and the inside of her throat ices over. 

This is how Sasha decides that the creature pretending to be her needs to die. 

***

“You know they won’t recognize you, right? Not like this," Michael tries to explain while Sasha paces, scheming. In the mirrors, she is a ghastly, unspooling thing. “They’ll just think you’re the nasty, evil monster who murdered their poor dear Sasha…” 

“Get off my dick,” she snaps. 

Now that Sasha has a goal, it’s like time speeds up every time she blinks. And she keeps forgetting that she doesn’t need to blink. Habits are habits, after all. 

The longer she stays away from the Institute, the worse things get. It can’t be that she just imagined the part where they all knew each other’s coffee orders, where they found ways to laugh at creeping horrors and walked each other home in the winter when the sun set early because -- well, didn’t they all have a bit more reason than most people to fear the dark? It can’t be. Can it? 

That feels like forever ago now, now that Jon’s driving himself halfway into his grave trying to understand why he feels like he’s being watched; now that it seems like Tim would gladly kick him the rest of the way down for a little peace and quiet. Now that Martin’s taken too much responsibility for everyone’s emotional well-being, which, with this crowd, is like giving a friend who enjoys eating sand a blank check for dental bills. He hovers over Jon like a guardian angel. If Jon noticed at all, he’d think it was suspicious. Sasha watches from behind a door that isn’t, and tears do not fall from eyes that were never there. 

She could swear there was a time when they were all a little in love with each other.  And she can’t shake the sense that if she were there, alive and whole and human, none of this would be happening.

“Oh, this is going to go horribly wrong,” Michael muses gleefully as she opens a new door into the tunnels. 

It’s completely possible that he’s right, but last night Sasha saw Not-Sasha empty a jar of spiders into Jon’s office while he was asleep, just for the sake of grating on his already-frayed nerves. That was the last straw. And now Sasha is going to tear her doppelganger limb from limb and scatter the pieces in places so blank, so uninhabitable, so utterly miserable that they were never even capable of existence. Thinking about it, Sasha’s smile is a freshly-cut throat. 

_ If I’ve really become a monster _ , she decides,  _ I’m damn well going to get the satisfaction of acting like one.  _


	2. Prodigal Children

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha takes matters into her own hands. In related news, content warning for hand injury.

The moment is drawing nearer and nearer. Not in seconds on a clock -- that kind of time means precious little to Sasha now. But she can sense it coming. She can feel it in her teeth. 

Every day at half-past two, offering no explanation, Not-Sasha drifts down to Artifact Storage. It keeps its head down and carries a notebook so that nobody will question where it’s going. Even Jon doesn’t seem to have noticed anything out of the ordinary. 

Today its death slinks up from the tunnels, all eye-searing color and hair floating in fractals.

Sasha treads silently, and reality bends around her. It’s been a long time since her feet fell on solid stone; its steadiness is almost disorienting. She wonders, briefly, if Michael has ever noticed that disorientation. She knows she’s not the same as he is, not precisely -- he is a thing that should not have a face, and she is a face that should not be a thing -- but they are both prodigal children of the Spiral, are they not? 

She knows a great many things these days, things about beings that lurk and loom, waiting impatient behind reality’s heavy curtains. Things, as much as they can be known, about It Is Not What It Is. 

Perhaps, after the impostor’s death, Sasha will dedicate herself to understanding the thing she’s become. Beyond the compass-point of revenge, her future is slippery as an oil slick. She sometimes thinks she’d like to come back to the Archives, if they’ll have her. 

But now isn’t the time to think about that. 

The tunnels twist and wind. That was frightening, once. Now it feels accommodating, normal. 

Finally, dread meanders through her and she knows she has arrived. Artifact Storage always scared her much more than anything else in the Institute -- for good reason, given what nearly happened to her there. Given what _did_ happen to her. She weaves among the carefully-stored unnatural objects like a ghost. 

Sasha finds the impostor right where she knew it would be. It’s staring senselessly at a large, intricately-patterned wooden table as it scribbles in its notebook. Silently materializing behind Not-Sasha, Sasha can see that it’s scribbling the same half-familiar words. 

_keep watching keep watching keep watching keep watching keep watching_

It will be a lovely irony to spill the impostor’s blood across that cursed table. Ironic enough to serve as sustenance for a creature like the one Sasha is turning into. 

_keep watching keep watching keep watching_

Sasha’s hands become knives. 

_keep watching keep watching keep wa_

“I think I’ll kill Martin Blackwood first,” Not-Sasha says suddenly, shattering the cryptlike silence. “What do you think?” 

It turns to look at Sasha, and there is no fear in its eyes. Not even a hint of surprise. Its mouth curls into a cold, inhuman smile. 

“I warned you,” it says. “You should’ve just kept watching.” 

***

“How dare you,” Sasha hisses, and she becomes every inch a nightmare. Her fingers lace a cage around Not-Sasha’s ribs, their edges so sharp the creature wouldn’t even feel their cut -- not at first. 

“How dare _I_?” it asks. “You’re the monster skulking around. I just work here.” 

“I know what you are,” Sasha snarls. “This place is not for you.” 

“Oh, because you fit in so well here, Distortion.” 

“I’m not the Distortion.” 

“So what are you? A plaything?” 

“I’m the real Sasha James,” says Sasha. “The last face you’ll ever see.” 

“Are you sure about that?” the thing whispers, still not a trace of alarm on its face. And then it screams. 

It’s a ragged, terrified, human sound, but the face emitting it is calm. Gleeful. 

“Help, please,” the creature howls, its eyes cruel as they bore into Sasha’s, its open mouth arching into a smile. “There’s something down here…” 

“Sasha!” yells a familiar voice. 

No, no -- it wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Tim was supposed to be upstairs, asleep at his desk, head pillowed on the open pages of _Strange Foundations: The Life and Work of Robert Smirke_ , messy curls crushed against its tiny typeface. Sasha knew he was there. Sasha had _checked_. 

But as her hands close around Not-Sasha, something drops with a clatter. A phone. Tim’s number on the dial screen.

“Looks like you’ll have to kill both of us,” whispers Not-Sasha, so quiet that the phone won’t pick it up -- certainly not over Tim’s yelling. 

The door behind Sasha crashes open.

“Leave her alone!” he yells, running at Sasha. He’s got a knife, the kind outdoorsy people carry. Her hands drop away from the imposter.

Behind him, Not-Sasha’s face is intolerably smug. 

“Tim, it’s me. It’s -- it’s Sasha,” she says. Behind him, Not-Sasha affects an indignant gasp. 

“What the _hell_ ?” says Tim from between his teeth. There’s a deep furrow between his eyebrows, a lost look in his eyes. _It is not what it is_. Her teeth crawl into a smile. There is power in confusion. 

The kaleidoscope in Sasha twists and veers out of control. 

Around her, the air shivers, iridescent. Her skin unspools in the same fractal patterns wound up in her hair. Tim stumbles back, eyes wide. 

“I’m your friend,” Sasha tries. “I’m trying to help.” 

But is she so sure of that, really? Her voice reverberates and curls back in on itself. Colors flicker around her like flame. Is she sure of anything? Is anyone? Is--

“Get back!” Tim yells. Sasha hadn’t even realized she’d stepped forward. 

“Tim...” she musters, but she’s unraveling and becoming, unraveling and becoming, her hands crawling across the Web Table towards him. 

She’s so busy watching his frightened eyes that she forgets about the knife. 

***

As it turns out, there’s still enough human in Sasha to hurt. And it does hurt -- a screaming emptiness where blood trying to course through her hand runs into cold metal instead. The pocket knife driven through her palm is stuck deep in the table’s wood. Her proximity to that creeping pattern makes her feel unclean. 

Tim’s facing her across the table in a defensive stance, as if she’s going to lift a finger to hurt him. As if she ever would. 

There’s a horrible ebbing and flowing -- flesh running into steel as it tries to knit itself back together. Sasha grits her teeth. 

She’s lightheaded, swimming in and out of a trance. The fragile flesh-and-blood creature in her shivers, going into something like shock -- _that is a lot of blood,_ she thinks distantly, _and it does not look anything like blood should look._

But the impossible creature in her surges forward, consumed by something both strange and familiar. An assurance that she is in debt, that she owes gratitude -- penitence -- devotion. Sasha is filled with a horror-struck reverence for doubt, for the Liar, for It Is Not What It Is. Her greatest fear. Her kidnapper. Her god. 

Unbidden, her left hand reaches forward and yanks out the knife. Its clatter is lost in the roar of static. 

Sasha raises her head and tongues of color spiral from the places where her body should have been, reaching, _reaching_. Indiscriminately. Towards the imposter, but towards Tim, too. He’s shouting and falling back, pushing Not-Sasha behind him. Protecting it. Iridescent Lichtenberg figures crawling over his wingtip shoes, up his legs.

Sasha thinks, _This isn’t what I wanted--_

Sasha thinks, _You don’t have to take him. Don’t, don’t, don’t--_

Sasha thinks, _What have I become?_

Distantly, she thinks she hears a door opening. 

“Remember?” she whispers, knowing Tim can’t hear her, and exhaustion hits like a wave. 

Behind him, Not-Sasha is alive, alive and mocking, alive and laughing, alive, alive, alive--

Two pairs of feet. “What’s going on?” she can hear. Martin’s voice, gone sharp with fear. Then Jon, wide-eyed: “But that’s impossible _…_ ”

The half-recognition on his face hits like a punch, and Sasha staggers back. When she falls, she’s surprised to feel something catch her. Hands that aren’t. Everything is too bright, and her eyes are burning. 

When she closes them, the world dissolves to nothing. 

***

_Sasha drifts. She has not slept since arriving in the Distortion, so this must be unconsciousness. She dreams of the Archives. Martin brings her cups of tea that crawl with spiders._ They’re really biologically beneficial _, he says. Jon won’t look at her. Jon can’t look at her. Jon has too many eyes, and none of them will look at her._

_Tim is dead and she killed him. Tim is alive and he knows she nearly killed him. Tim is alive and has no idea that Not-Sasha is an impostor. Tim knows, but he likes the impostor better than Sasha, especially after she nearly killed him._

Even frightening things can be biologically beneficial _, counsels Martin, sipping spiders._

***

_She is back in the Distortion. As she wanders endless corridors, every mirror reflects Not-Sasha. She raises Not-Sasha’s hands to Not-Sasha’s face and screams._

_Sasha wakes up still screaming, sprawled on the corridor’s runner carpet._

_Things that are not fingers comb through her fractal-spun hair._

_“Shh,” she hears. “You’re doing so well. Shh, shh. You’re here. You’re here.”_

_She’s not sure if that’s comfort or a curse._

***

When Sasha regains consciousness, Michael is glaring at her. 

“That was very, very stupid,” he says. 

“Fuck off,” Sasha croaks. The hallway’s colors are far too loud. She feels...well, frankly, she feels hungover. Through half-lidded eyes she can see that somehow all the parts of her have ended up back where they were before. The incident left its mark, though: a new scar drifts up her right arm from the now-healed wound through her palm. Its mazelike lines fracture and twist, the blueprint to an impossible hallway. When she turns her arm the scar shimmers, iridescent. Sasha's head throbs arrhythmically. 

“Close your eyes,” Michael advises. “It’ll hurt to look at anything for a while.” 

Curiosity overwhelms her. She squints up at him, then immediately looks away, covering her eyes. 

“I’m not _that_ ugly,” he says defensively. 

“So this has...this has happened to you before?” 

“None of your business.”

Memory runs up her spine like an electric shock, and a wave of misery hits so hard that Sasha almost wants to climb back into the nightmares. 

“Tim?” she asks, unable to conceal the tremor in her traitor voice. 

“No, it’s Michael. The Spiral really got you, hm?” 

“No, dipshit. What happened to Tim?” 

Michael sighs. “You’re all so tiresome, you know that? On and on with this trite ‘caring for each other’s well-being’...”

“ _Michael_.” 

“Yes, yes. He’s..physically, he’s fine. Quite shaken up.” He's unpleasantly cheerful about this, sipping psychological distress like she used to drink discount wine on Friday nights. 

“And the creature?” 

Michael doesn’t respond. Alive, then; alive and still pretending to be her, most likely completely unquestioned. 

“What...what _happened_ ? How did I... _why_ did I...” It’s not that she doesn’t remember, but that everything she does remember is too strange to believe. She can’t keep her mind’s eye on it for too long. Too frightening to think that her will may no longer be her own. 

“You did too much before you were ready,” Michael says. 

“I didn’t mean to. It just...took over.” 

“Yes. Because you weren’t ready.” Feels like circular reasoning, but that’s...well, that’s to be expected. Theirs is an unreasonable realm. 

“Did you come after me?” 

“I came to clean up your mess,” Michael snaps, but he’s standing to turn out a few lights. In the dim, she can open her eyes. 

“I shouldn’t have rushed in,” Sasha admits.

“You think?” 

“But I’m still going to kill it.” 

Michael sighs. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alexa, play "You Can't Always Get What You Want"...at least not until you've learned to harness your eldritch abilites.
> 
> The comments on Chapter 1 absolutely made my day! Thanks for joining me on this flight of fancy, and stay tuned for revelations, reunions, & maybe a heart-to-heart with everybody's least favorite librarian.


	3. Cause and Effect

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha does what needs to be done. Content warning for canon-typical violence.

Cause and effect, cause and effect. Sasha had gone after Not-Sasha because it’d been antagonizing Jon. Because Sasha had gone after Not-Sasha, Jon was twenty times more convinced that someone or something in the Archives was coming to kill him. Futures are a twisting thing, their linearity something she can’t quite get her mind around these days. 

Sasha tells herself that if she’d known what it would do to him, she never would’ve gone into Artifact Storage. She’s lying. There had never been the slightest whisper of a chance that she wouldn’t take every opportunity to see that creature dead. Any mercy she ought to have had was gone along with the version of herself who’d come through Jane Prentiss’s attack fully human.

Cause and effect, cause and effect; sudden angles manipulating paths that had once seemed straightforward. 

This particular path leads to nine mugs, all half-filled with cold tea, crowded on Jon’s desk; to a haunted look in his eyes and hands so shaky that trying to write labels on tapes drives him to swear viciously under his breath. Every action he takes has the unthinking desperation of a cornered prey animal. 

That week, Martin leaves work in tears after Jon snaps at him. _I can tell you’re lying. I don’t see why you even try._ Jon never specifies what he thinks Martin is lying about. Someone could tell him “good morning” and he’d think it was an elaborate trap. 

That week, Jon stops going home; starts going through Not-Sasha’s desk after hours. He doesn’t find anything except the tattered notebook Sasha remembers bringing back from Clapham after investigating the first case with the Web Table. _Keep watching. Keep watching. Keep watching._ Somehow, Sasha doesn’t think that’s the advice Jon needs. 

That week, Tim drafts exactly five and a half resignation letters. He can’t bring himself to leave any of them on Elias’s desk. 

“Oh, Sasha,” says Michael softly. “You’ve really done it now.” 

She glares back at him, all backgrounds and foregrounds, all stripes so close together they blur. 

“I think you should go back,” he says, twirling a lock of hair around a finger that keeps confusing itself with the errant curl. “Try again. What could possibly go wrong? I’m sure that seeing you would help. Especially Jon. I don’t think that wouldn’t horrify him at all.”

“I don’t understand,” she mutters. “It was like he knew me.”

“Oh, I’d count on it. He just doesn’t know that he knows.” 

“Have you ever given anyone a straight answer?” 

“I most certainly haven’t,” he says, and winks. 

***

In the meantime, though, Sasha learns. She spends hours in front of a wide-framed antique mirror, practicing ways to contain everything inhuman about her in the form she used to know. It’s near-perfect, though she still can’t kick the strange swirls in her hair or the shimmer around her every time she moves too quickly. 

Other days, she finds out how far she can extend herself in...other directions. She hasn’t felt the Spiral’s hand again since that afternoon in Artifact Storage, but there are moments of holographic light, moments when she can’t remember that she’s forgotten what sleep felt like, moments when dread rises through her like a holy ghost. Fingers and strands of hair wind and unwind; shapes become smaller and repeat to an infinity Sasha swears she can see. 

It’s in one of these moments of experimentation that pins and needles crawl up Sasha’s right wrist like an electric shock. 

“Fuck,” she curses, letting a carefully-crafted illusion that she had five completely different faces fall away in a sudden splash of static. 

When she looks down at it, the branching scar is crawling with color. Neon shades swirl from points like the eyes of tiny hurricanes along paths that have suddenly become familiar. 

_What..._ she thinks, then _oh_ , then _well, this could be very convenient._

***

“A map!” she tells Michael, hands creating themselves anew in her excitement. 

“Every time someone says that to me, it ends poorly,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Why do you need one, anyway? I thought you knew your way around the tunnels.” 

“Nobody knows their way around the tunnels,” she says. “The scar just-- just woke up or something. There’s something going on down there, I’m sure of it. I think it wants me to...to investigate.” 

He pauses for a moment, studying her with the keen, vicious gaze of a stray cat watching a rodent scurry unawares, all his playful cruelty suddenly hardened cold and sharp. 

“Stay out of it,” he says icily. 

“What’s your problem?” Sasha asks, taken aback. At her sides, her hands curl into something like fists. 

“This doesn’t concern you.” 

“Oh, it very much concerns me! What if they’re in danger?” 

“What if they are? What’s it to you? _They’ve forgotten you even_ \--”

“--It’s that thing, isn’t it? It’s planning something horrible, I can--” 

“You can’t, and you won’t,” says Michael. “You know I’ve enjoyed our friendship, Sasha, I really have. But if you start trying to meddle, I _will_ \--”

“You’ll what? Kill me?” Sasha laughs with a preternatural confidence that starts under her fingernails. “I dare you to try.” 

“That’s cocky, coming from someone who couldn’t make it through a regular Tuesday without collapsing on the Archives floor.” 

Sasha grits her teeth, stung. How human of her to seek familiarity anywhere, even amongst monsters. How foolish to think he’d been on her side -- that he’d been on anybody’s side but his own. Frenetic frustration boils under her skin.

“Don’t go into the tunnels. If you try, I’ll stop you. By any means necessary.” He tilts his head and stares at her, cold as death, before letting a small, sharp smile drift through his words. “Or unnecessary. Frankly, I don’t much care.” 

“Why?” 

“Because these are machinations far beyond whatever you think you know,” he says, “and I won’t have them scrambled by your little vendetta.”

 _Fine, then_ , thinks Sasha, grinding her teeth. _If this has to end in blood, so be it._

“Fine,” she repeats aloud, affecting a sulk. Behind her, one of her hands is already carving a door. 

“Good,” Michael says, sing-song. “Now, I have lots to do, things to arrange--”

The hallway’s wallpaper crumbles under Sasha’s fingers like torn skin. It isn’t right, isn’t _proper_ for her to use her powers against the corridors like this. She wrenches the door open even as dissonance shudders through her bones.

Michael breaks off mid-sentence with a hiss between his teeth, echoing metallic like a mouthful of blood, and raises a warped hand to clutch at some unseen wound.

He looks up at her, wide eyes pure murder. 

“I needed a door,” she says with a shrug, and steps backwards into the dark. 

***

The tunnels are...well, quiet is an understatement. They’re pitch-black and silent, unease dripping down the walls like condensation. 

But the path ahead is clear, and she is moving towards something. She isn’t sure what and she isn’t sure why, but the map is accurate, and she knows without knowing that her search will lead to whatever needs to be found. 

Things echo down here. Sounds warp and twist; each of Sasha’s footfalls sounds strangely distant. Come to think of it, though, she’s not sure that’s the tunnels. It might just be the way things work now. She pauses for a moment, leaning into the silence. And then--

Voices. No, more than that -- shouts, distant and chilling, calling her like a homing beacon. 

She follows the sounds like Ariadne’s string, letting the map etched into her skin illuminate the way like a lantern. And when she peers around a final jagged corner, she knows _exactly_ what she’s been summoned to do. 

“Found you,” she hears the creature that isn’t her say as it scuttles towards the place where Jon is backed against the wall, knuckles white around one last recording, the life in his eyes a waning crescent moon. 

“No, please--” he says, voice all lost hope and broken crystal. 

This time, strangely, Sasha is calm. She’s the glassy surface of a river, lightning’s searing silence before thunder’s inevitable roar, all the quiet horror of incomprehensible things. All the power of unknowability. 

The neon light that pours through Sasha’s skin and over her hands almost sears her own eyes; she sees Jon throw an arm up reflexively over his. She is static, sharp and jarring. Red and blue lines so close together they blur the gaze. She opens the lockbox of heat and terror in her chest and finds the Spiral there, infinite, otherworldly, hideous. She is eyes upon eyes upon hands upon hands, all blooming chrysanthemum-like from the place where her heart used to be. She is made of poison. She is made of fire. She is made of knives, and if Michael is the throat of delusion, she is surely chaos incarnate. 

Not-Sasha turns to face her. This time, fear is raw and bloody in its eyes. 

_The last face you’ll ever see_ , thinks Sasha, and she digs her scalpel-sharp hands deep into the thing that isn’t her. 

She half-expected to find cobwebs and sawdust, but the imposter bleeds, and beneath them, the stone floors almost seem to drink. It screams, oh, yes, it screams, and tonight there is nothing calculated about its cries. It’s inhuman as anything, but its guts are mortal enough. 

She’s not sure if Not-Sasha tries to say something before it collapses into flesh and gore and filth. 

Sasha takes a deep breath as fear lances through her. If she can’t bring herself back from this, Jon will be as dead as if she hadn’t intervened. She remembers the antique mirror. She remembers a face that used to be hers. Slowly, slowly, Sasha lets herself shrink. 

Jon stares. 

“Come on,” she says, reaching out. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Sasha?” he says, swaying a little, wearing too much shock and not enough sleep like an ill-fitting sweater. “You’re not...you’re not _real_ , are you?”

“That’s a complicated question,” she says, “but I’m here now. Really.” 

“You were dead,” Jon says faintly. “You were dead, and it was-- it was _my fault._ ”

“No,” says Sasha. “It never was.” 

She tries to wipe some of Not-Sasha’s viscera off of her long, winding fingers onto her equally bloody skirt. 

“Your hands,” Jon says, horrified. 

“I know,” she says, and she hears the sadness in her voice several moments before she feels anything, the phantom-limb ache of innocence lost. 

And then, somewhere behind Sasha, there’s a sound. She turns, trying to ignore the exhaustion she can feel solidifying like concrete behind her eyes, half-ready to strike out and kill whatever’s daring to move. Before she can, she freezes, totally perplexed. 

“This is all very touching,” says a man she doesn’t recognize, his greying hair badly cut and his pale eyes sunken, “but I need to speak with the Archivist.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BIGGEST CLOWN IN THE CIRCUS LAUGHED OUT OF TOWN COWBOY MOTHERFUCKING JURGEN LEITNER........  
> Again, thanks so much for your comments :^) Hope you're all having a great week; stay tuned for workplace comedy content, scheming, and me quite literally putting on my clown shoes.


	4. Strange Foundations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ties that bind, passages that wind, and books that never should've been opened...

“Let me  _ go! _ ” snarls Sasha, furious. 

“No,” says Jurgen Leitner, who’d introduced himself only moments before pulling out one of his moldering volumes and using it to trap Sasha in a shrinking tunnel, its walls close and choking. She’s tired enough to faint, but the brickwork is digging into her where ribs should be. A pang of regret over her falling-out with Michael percolates in her consciousness. She could really fucking use a door. 

“This won’t work like you think it will,” she manages. Bone and brick and hair and stone -- she’s not sure what belongs to her and what belongs to the maze. 

“Come on. Let her go,” Jon snaps. 

“It’ll follow us.” 

“Then she follows us,” he says. “There’s no reason to believe she’s not--”

“Believe  _ me _ ,” Leitner says. “It might not be the...the Not-Them, but it’s still dangerous.” 

“I said,  _ this won’t work like you think _ ,” Sasha hisses. With a distant smugness, she imagines that Leitner and his ilk will be theorizing about it for weeks -- years, probably. Whether the book reacted to Smirke’s architecture. Whether Smirke’s architecture reacted to the Spiral. Whether Leitner knew she’d already been half-bound to the tunnels when he started asking them to take her in. To be fair, she doesn’t know the answer herself, but perplexing things are rather her domain. She is confusion’s hands on Earth, after all. 

Sasha grits her teeth and sets her mind on becoming. 

It’s a dull but grinding ache, reaching beyond a body. A wide and stabbing torture as she laces herself into the structure around her. Her mouth is full of mortar and her hair is full of dust as she lets herself melt into the tunnel walls. 

“What did you  _ do _ ?” she distantly hears Jon yell.

“I didn’t do anything,” Leitner says, clearly shaken. “And as much as I hate to say this...we have to get out of the tunnels.  _ Now _ .” 

***

“It deals in fooling the senses, in making you see and hear things that are not there, in drawing you into mazes and making you doubt your own sanity,” says Leitner, staring into the middle distance. He’s spent the last half an hour doing everything possible to avoid meeting Jon’s eyes.

“Fractals,” Jon says. Within the walls, Sasha runs a hand through her hair. She’s less comfortable eavesdropping here than she would’ve been in the tunnels, and a strangling kind of exhaustion is seeping through her. But she doesn’t want to leave Jon alone. She doesn’t trust that...that  _ librarian _ . 

“Yes, it seems to have a particular fondness for them,” says Leitner. 

“And-- if it could make you think it was a person…someone you knew...” He hesitates like he’s not sure he wants to know the answer. 

“That’s more the Stranger’s domain,” says Leitner. “You’re thinking about that assistant of yours, aren’t you?” 

A pause. 

“It’s odd,” she hears Leitner say. “It certainly wasn’t in your head...if the Spiral was trying to toy with you, I wouldn’t have been able to see anything. And the creature had more of an identity than it would’ve if your Sasha had simply become part of the Distortion. So I don’t really, I couldn’t exactly--” 

“You don’t know,” says Jon, clearly annoyed. 

“I don’t know,” Leitner admits. 

“And what happened in the tunnels was…”

“I don’t know that, either. It’s...bound itself to the tunnels, somehow. The book was only supposed to shift the architecture; I don’t see how it could have forced that kind of transformation.” 

“What does that  _ mean _ ?” Jon asks. Sasha can picture him leaning forward, eyes sharp behind his thick-lensed glasses. 

“It means that those passageways belong to the Spiral now. Which, given the nature of this place...well, I imagine it could be quite a problem.” 

“It’s rude to talk about people behind their backs,” says Sasha out loud, giving up any pretense of subtlety, letting herself be seen. 

“Yes. It’s rude to talk about  _ people _ ,” returns Leitner, nervous distaste overthrowing his world-weariness. He’s more rattled now than he had been in the tunnels, knowing that his old refuge has become her domain. Knowing that there’s nowhere left to hide. 

“Don’t speak to her like that,” says Jon, fixing the librarian with a cold, flinty look. She’s never appreciated his general distaste for strangers more. Leitner’s last-nerve rudeness doesn’t bother her, not really, but Jon’s defense feels like trust. 

“This isn’t the Sasha you know,” Leitner cautions.

“Well, nothing’s the  _ anything _ I know, apparently,” says Jon, acidic.

“I’m not doing this if that creature’s listening,” says Leitner, averting his eyes from Sasha’s twisted silhouette. 

“Sasha, would you mind?” asks Jon. “You can stay in the break room, if you like. I just need to-- I need to have this conversation. Then we can talk.” 

“That would be nice,” she says, disappearing into a swirling, creeping smile. 

***

Just being back inside the Institute makes Sasha's skin crawl. Being here, in the break room, on the worn grey couch where she can remember reading the news through cracks in her phone’s screen every morning, surrounded by the old familiar smell of overcooked coffee and dust, is...it’s too much. Nostalgia becomes a thing with teeth, and her overtaxed mind flutters like a tired eye. She thinks she sees Gertrude’s ghost in the darkest, dustiest corners, watching Sasha with curious eyes, taking notes. Sasha blinks. Another ghost takes Gertrude’s place -- a boy with curling blonde hair, heartbreak all over his face, eyes heavy with reproach. She’s sure she’s never seen him. She’s sure she knows him well. Her head aches. Where are Tim and Martin? Why isn’t anybody here? 

***

The minutes creep like spiders. Jon does not come back. 

***

When the door finally opens, it’s Martin. Sasha’s still motionless on the break room couch, disintegrating, the past slicing her into scattered pieces of different puzzles. He freezes when he sees her. She watches vacantly as he takes a breath, sets his jaw, focuses on a point slightly to her left so he doesn’t have to strain his eyes on the static of her. He sits down in an armchair a few feet away. 

“Sasha?” he says, shaking her out of her dissolution. She looks up. “Is it okay if I ask you something?” 

“‘Course,” she says, acutely aware of the shimmering echo in her voice, the tinge of nails-on-a-chalkboard unreality. He doesn’t go on, doesn’t move, doesn’t say anything, until--

“I’m sorry,” Martin says. “This has all been...it’s been really...confusing.” 

She carefully disentangles the Cheshire cat grin trying to swim onto her face. Michael’s bad influence, probably. Or maybe it’s just her. Sasha wishes she could think about confusing the people around her without feeling...well, feeling  _ hungry _ . For a harrowing moment she wants to deflect, wants to mislead, wants to give five different stories so she can watch everyone try to make sense where there's none to be found. Instead, she bites her tongue and doesn't answer. 

“So. I hate to ask this," Martin says, breaking the silence. "I mean, I know you’re...I know that other thing was…” He sighs, a little frustrated. “I don’t even know how to put this into words.” 

He’s still struggling to look at her, subtly gazing past her blurry outline and the flung-out shapes of her hands like they’re the gratuitous gore in a B-rated horror flick. 

“Are you really Sasha?” he finally asks. “Or is this just another...another scheme?” 

She sighs. 

“I’m not real the way you are,” she says, carefully considering the words. Attempting clarity is making her a bit light-headed. “I’m not...bound by the same laws, I don’t think. I don’t exist in the same way. If that makes sense.” 

“It doesn’t, really...” 

“Okay...I’m not in your head. I’m not something pretending to be Sasha, not like that  _ thing _ . But I’m not human. And I’m not--” 

Sasha pauses, considering. 

She thinks,  _ If I speak this into being, there will be no return. _

She thinks,  _ If I lie now, there will be no return. _

She thinks,  _ No matter what I say, there will be no return. The least I can do is be a friend.  _

“--I’m not the same Sasha. I have her memories, you know, and I look like her sometimes. I like to think that my thoughts are still my thoughts. But...I’m so sorry, Martin. I think the person you knew is-- not dead, exactly. Not dead, but...gone.”

***

“Where’s Tim?” Sasha asks when Martin comes back into the room. He looks worse for wear, eyes heavy and overwhelmed, the way people tend to look when they return from meetings with Elias. 

“Oh,” Martin says hesitantly. She’s not sure if he’s reluctant to tell her or just reluctant to talk to her altogether. “He’s been going through...well, things have been hard for him lately. And, if I’m honest, he...he isn’t sure about you. Don’t get me wrong, I believe you. But he’s afraid that this is--” 

“It’s not a trick.”

“Yes, I know. But if it is, it’ll kill him,” Martin says quietly, and for the first time, he looks right at her. 

“Okay,” she says, hollow. Remembering the close call in Artifact Storage. Remembering him protecting the thing that wasn’t her. Remembering a brief flicker of harrowed doubt in his eyes. She'd never seen Tim look so lost. “Okay.” 

“And it’s been a long day for everyone,” Martin goes on, eager to change the subject. “I mean, that  _ place _ , and then-- well, you weren’t there when…”

“When what?” 

“When we found...whoever that was.” 

“What?” 

This is how Sasha learns what happened to the librarian, found crushed and bloody where she’d last seen him talking to Jon. The pipe Jon had been carrying lying on the desk, leaking gore onto a few unfortunate files. Jon, vanished from the Institute, wanted on suspicion of murder.  _ Like fighting the goddamn Hydra,  _ she thinks. Solve a problem and five more grow in its place, all of them deadlier and nastier and readier to tear somebody limb from limb. 

“He didn’t do it,” Martin tells her, eyes all steel-cast certainty. 

“Then who?” she asks. She pauses. “And... _ what _ place?” 

***

When the yellow door flickers into being, Sasha kicks it open. 

“Archivi-- Oh!” says Michael, surprised. “It’s  _ you _ .” 

He barely gets through the last syllable before she grabs him by the collar. His attempts to slip into unreality are lost on her, her own hands wrapping and binding faster than he can deceive the universe into letting him vanish. 

“Unless you want to be my next  _ little vendetta _ , you will  _ never _ lay a hand on anyone from the Institute again,” she growls, matching all the viciousness she can read in his eyes. 

“Even Elias?” he gasps sarcastically. She considers. 

“No. Do whatever to Elias. But you know what I mean. Don’t you?” Sasha’s hands go half-knifelike -- sharp enough to warn, but not quite sharp enough to cut. 

“Alright, alright. Fine.”

“Fine, then,” she says. He glares as she lets him go and steps easily back over the threshold. Should be impossible, of course, but she’s an impossible thing. 

“Well, you’ve quite come into your own,” Michael says, surveying her with distaste. 

In answer, Sasha raises an eyebrow, defiant and dangerous, and slams the door. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading & for your comments/kudos/notes on unending fury towards jurgen leitner!! <3 Stay tuned for rebuilding what's been lost, impending clown content, and....my wife!?!


	5. Artifacts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha seeks to repair what has been broken.

Slow and steady, like healing a broken bone: that’s the only way Sasha will earn her old friends’ trust. 

Words are hard. They’re twisting, inconstant things. When Sasha tries to wield them she feels like a painter with the shakes, muddying canvases with motion as involuntary as a heartbeat. She has no standalone door to lead overcurious innocents astray, and the impulse to mislead has become rather grating. She’s had something that feels like a caffeine withdrawal headache for at least a week, and she remembers the fear in her double’s eyes with a sinister fondness. 

“Is it just going to be like this now?” she asks Michael, leaning against his barely-there doorframe in a huff. 

“Yes!” he says buoyantly. “It Is Not What It Is will chip away at you…” He leans his head to one side and smiles, almost peaceful in his familiar grotesquerie. “...Until you learn to feed it.”

Sasha groans and rubs her tired eyes. Maybe it will. Maybe she’d best learn to pawn blood and panic and _terror_ for her dread patron’s favor, but she won’t let her friends become kindling for that particular fire. So, as long as the Spiral speaks through her, she decides to rely on something else -- gestures, favors, signals. Small, kind things that don’t require explanation. Things that can’t lie. 

On second thought, she realizes too late, anonymously leaving a dusty compendium of Wilde’s poetry on Martin’s desk might’ve been both a little ominous and a little on-the-nose. She found it in the tunnels, where no door is locked to her, where there is nothing she cannot find if she asks. He furrows his brow, looks around suspiciously, carefully checks the book’s inside cover to make sure it’s nothing sinister. The next day, Sasha reaches through a trapdoor and finds a cooling cup of tea on the floor, a post-it note stuck next to it reading simply “ _Thanks?_ ” She laughs at the question mark and wonders how to break the news that she doesn’t exactly eat or drink. 

Later, trying to fix a bug on Jon’s long-unused computer, she corrupts half his files and somehow leaves the screen swimming with shimmering static. Her frustrated sigh must be audible from the hallway, because a compact woman with dark, asymmetrical hair peers in the door and flinches back several feet. Lately, no matter how hard Sasha tries to arrange the trappings of humanity over her warped bones, she hasn’t been able to hide the spidery lines mapping the tunnels across most of her body. She gathers from the way the woman looks away that the overall effect is, to put it mildly, jarring. 

“What _are_ you?” she half-gasps, half-yells, somewhere between horror-struck and exasperated. 

“Oh! I’m...” says Sasha, any answer that would make sense escaping her. Instead, she finishes opaquely, “Do you know anything about computers?” 

“Are you serious?” Though still visibly shaken, the woman cocks an eyebrow. 

“Yes?” 

She’s surprised when the woman gives a snort of laughter. “Sorry. It’s just that...generally the supernatural encounters I’ve had are more...hostile? That just seemed so...so normal. No offense?” 

“I used to have a knack,” Sasha says, “but it…and I... this is just going to make things worse.”

“Here,” says the woman. “Jon’s got everything backed up on a hard drive. Fuckin’ nerd. I can restore the files. He hasn’t been back in a while, so I wouldn’t worry. You probably shouldn’t touch it, though.” She pauses for a second, eyes narrowed, looking like she’s calculating whether she needs to be afraid of Sasha.

“I’m Melanie King,” she finally says. “It’s nice to meet you.” 

“I'm Sasha.” She narrowly stops herself from raising a ghastly hand to shake Melanie’s. 

“Oh, _you’re_ …” She trails off. When Melanie continues, her voice is softer. “They really missed you, you know.” 

“I know. I missed them too.” 

***

Sasha’s next idea is a little more complicated. She hasn’t tried to leave the tunnels, hasn’t tried to navigate the world that she once belonged to; not since the worms, not since the corridors, not since those long, contorted nights of hideous transformation. 

And now she has to go to Tesco. 

Sasha scrounges a couple of overcoats from the Institute, hoping their owners won’t decide to nip out for a coffee in the middle of the day, and piles them on over the strange opaline map curling up her arms. She ties her hair back and hopes it just looks messy. 

She arrives back at the Institute, having earned herself four or five odd glances and an old-fashioned glass bottle of grape Fanta.

***

April 2016  
One year ago

_“Disgusting.” Sasha wrinkles her nose at Tim._

_“It is easily the best fizzy drink!” he says defiantly. “It mixes well with literally any alcohol--”_

_“--so you can’t remember how unpleasant it is,” she says._

_“It’s a fun drink for an upbeat social occasion!” says Tim, gesticulating wildly._

_“Don’t they only make grape Fanta sugar-free?”_

_“Well, then it’s heart-healthy.”_

_“Seriously. It’s not like I had some grand plan to become Head Archivist. You do_ not _have to take me out for condolence drinks,” Sasha says, letting her hair out of its bun and slipping the scrunchie around her wrist. “Especially if you’re going to leap on the opportunity to pitch the virtues of the worst beverage in the United Kingdom and possibly the world.”_

_“Okay, then you’re taking me out for condolence drinks because I expected you to be Head Archivist. Imagine...we could’ve had a functional workplace? Run by somebody who knows what they’re doing? Shocking!_ ”

“ _Don’t be mean,” Sasha rebukes gently._

_“I’m not! I just think you deserve the best and I will kick anyone who disagrees in the knees. Even Elias. Especially Elias.”_

_“Shut up,” she says fondly._

***

Sasha knows Tim isn’t sure about seeing her, suspects he’s busy walling himself off so he’ll be able to weather some imagined worst-case scenario. Martin’s tried twice to intercede, but he knows as well as Sasha does that Tim is stubborn at the best of times. And these days, these long nights in the Archives with him making half-baked plans to quit or flee or escape -- they register squarely in the “worst of times” column. Sasha suspects that the longer she waits, the more he’ll become convinced she’s just another imposter. 

So she scribbles a note on a sheet of ostentatiously high-quality Institute stationery and pins it under the Fanta bottle, a barely-relevant inside joke from just last year, a priceless artifact wrested from a dead and decaying past. 

_Dear Tim,_ it starts. 

_I understand why you’re not ready to talk. You have every reason not to trust_ ~~ _monsters_~~ ~~_people like_~~ ~~_things like_~~ _me. I don’t just mean the last few months at the Institute, though I want you to know that I wish that I could have been there. I don’t know how much I could’ve helped, but, hey, I could’ve at least filed things correctly, right?_

_Bad joke. Old Man Sims is doing just fine._

_No, I’m talking about all of it. I wish none of this had ever touched you_ ~~_or your family_ ~~

~~_I wish that Da_ ~~

~~_I wish I could fix_ ~~

_I wish you’d never had to learn the things you know. I can’t do anything about that now, but I can promise that I’ll help you, now and forever._

_Sorry if this isn’t making sense. I hope you know what I mean. Anyway, I’ll be here._

_Still yours,_ _  
_ _Sasha_

***

“Sasha? Come on, I know you’re in there.” 

She’s soundly surprised to hear a familiar voice calling outside the trapdoor. Sasha lets it creak open and peers up, marveling for a moment at how solid the Institute’s walls look compared to the crumbling edifices of her subterranean metropolis. Letting her eyes wander across the person sitting cross-legged on the floor, fiddling with a pen in his left hand and brushing hair out of his eyes with his right. 

“Tim?” 

Tim had always been curiously immune to exhaustion. Jon had his chronic fatigue, so bad sometimes that even Elias had been known to ask if he was ill; Martin’s insomnia drove his electric bill up when he spent too many nights reading with all the lights on; Sasha's occasional bouts of academic burnout left her sharp-tongued and clumsy. Tim, though, was always remarkably fresh-faced; even the morning after a night out, even injured, even grieving. A springtime person, not stuck in eternal autumn like the rest of them. Now, though, he’s wan and bleary-eyed. Not like he hasn’t been sleeping -- not exactly. Like he’s been having nightmares. 

“Sasha,” he says, and her name becomes a ceramic plate slipping floorward from hasty hands. After so many side-eyed glances and heads turned away, she’s almost taken aback when he looks straight at her. In the dark, the map laced across her skin glows; she has not altered her appearance to make herself seem more human. Whatever he’s seeing is almost too honest. She bites her tongue, afraid of misstepping. Afraid that she might, on instinct alone, start telling lies. 

“It really is you, isn’t it?” he finally says. His face is somber as a funeral, but his eyes are clearer now. 

“Yes.” 

“You’re the thing I stabbed in Artifact Storage,” he says. 

She nods, holds out her hand. To her surprise, Tim doesn’t flinch back. Instead, he reaches out and lays a finger across the scar. 

“I am...I am _so_ sorry. I didn’t know, I swear. If I’d known what that thing was, I never would have-- I’m sorry.” 

“I’m sorry too,” she says. “I didn’t mean to-- well. I don’t think I meant to frighten you. I know that I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Why does your voice-- why is it like that?” The question is disjointed, impulsive. An odd thing; she never thought to ask Michael about his voice. She supposes she has no idea. She supposes she knows perfectly well. 

“Because the tunnels are also speaking,” she answers with a wince. She doesn’t think she’s confusing him on purpose. She isn’t, is she? 

“I really thought you were dead,” he says, and his voice shudders like the earth caving in around a sinkhole. She remembers this side of him well: the impetuous confession always on his lips, the emotional lapse of the tongue he often wishes he could take back. “After we saw what that thing -- the Not-Them -- really was...I couldn’t stop thinking that I never even knew you were gone. I was the one who left you behind, and I didn’t even know it was goodbye--” 

“It wasn’t,” she says roughly. Behind her ribs, something in the shape of a human heart disassembles and reassembles, glinting like shards of broken mirror scattered on the floor of a passageway to nowhere. “It wasn’t. I’m here now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My wife AND clown content briefly postponed because it turns out that the wellspring of emotion in my heart about the s1 archival staff is (surprise surprise) INFINITE!  
> Thanks so much for reading! <3 This fic's going to be a bit longer than I anticipated, so buckle in for a) more freshly-googled synonyms for "iridescent" and b) my strong desire for everyone to be some semblance of okay, goshdarnit


	6. Beautiful Things

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A new door opens.

The passageways beneath the Institute tangle and turn in on themselves, thrumming with a new and unfamiliar energy. Sasha isn’t completely sure whether she’s imprisoned in the tunnels or whether they belong to her; not sure where she is separate from the tunnels and where there’s neither _she_ nor _the tunnels_ , only miles of gnarled stone. Only twisting, crumpled things, veins which have spent the last hundred-some years reordering themselves to their own will in defiance of their architect’s grand plans. There are still areas that feel cold to the touch -- doors emanating such bloodcurdling energy that Sasha hasn’t even tried to open them yet, knowing she’ll have to fight whatever’s on the other side. 

She’s eventually going to have to read Robert Smirke’s texts, going to have to open every door and seek out every strange thing that lurks under the Institute. 

Luckily, research is a set of skills she doesn’t think she could forget if she tried. Sasha rifles through decrepit oversize storage boxes until she finds Smirke’s blueprints of the old Millbank Prison. She’s skimming through them in the middle of the night when something sweeps over her. It’s like radio interference, like pressing both hands to a static-filled television screen. It’s the knife-sharp panic that comes with being lost, that feeling she’d become so accustomed to in the corridors. 

It’s a strange sort of sadness, sharp and raw and almost overwhelming. The blueprints slip from her hands. 

***

_It is cold, freezing cold. There is an island, glorious to her eyes. A place that does not exist. A place where all things are right. Sasha could live there, in a world like that island, and she would never hunger and she would never hide._

_It is cold, chillingly cold. She sees Gertrude, younger than Sasha had ever known her, her grey hair still shot through with chestnut. She is looking over the prow of a ship, eyes steely, jaw set._

_It is cold, gravelike cold. That blonde man, the one called Michael Shelley, the assistant Gertrude must have mentioned, once, a long time ago, is holding a map. Is opening a yellow door. Is looking back, eyes liquid betrayal, Orpheus watching Eurydice fade into Hades’ grip. Mistakes understood too late. Realization and regret and pure, distilled terror._

_There is a long and tearing scream, buckling and breaking, unbecoming and forgetting and dying. Beginnings and endings swallowing one another, a dizzy and never-ending ouroboros._

_Sasha watches, weeping, as Gertrude turns away._

***

“Sasha? Sasha!” 

Her eyes refocus, abrupt and urgent. It’s the voice of someone who’s spent a good deal of time screaming over the last few hours; one she knows well, haggard and scratchy though it is. 

“Oh no,” she says, half-accidentally. She doesn’t mean it as an exclamation of disbelief or of dismay -- it’s involuntary, the only natural response to the vision before her. 

She hasn’t seen Jon since that long, dark night in the tunnels; not since he’d fled after Jurgen Leitner was found dead. He looks…well, “worse” doesn’t cover it. He looks like he’s spent the last several weeks getting into knife fights. His right hand is clumsily wrapped in fraying gauze, and he unconsciously holds it against his ribs like something hurts. His dark hair is greyer than she remembers, and -- good Lord, has someone tried to cut his throat? 

Sasha is so alarmed that it takes her a full several seconds before she registers that the door he just appeared from wasn’t there before.

“Oh, _you’re_ Sasha!” This voice is cracked around the edges, resonant in ways it shouldn’t be, and a hand swims from the familiar door’s sunny-painted frame. It is long and delicate and hideous, blurring before Sasha’s eyes, bones arcing and lacing at impossible angles. 

There is a creature of the Spiral clawing its way forth from the doorway, and it is not Michael.

Sasha stares. This different Distortion is something Sasha’s never seen before, dislocated from herself like a shoulder out of socket, all triangles and flashing teeth. Looking at her feels like brain freeze, feels like missing the last stair, feels like a hundred voices shuddering into tritone dissonance. Reality parts around her in rippling silken curtains. 

“Sasha, this is Helen. Helen, Sasha,” says Jon wearily, gesturing from one to the other with his good hand. 

“Michael’s gone,” is all Sasha can think to say. 

“Michael got distracted,” says Helen. “You know how it is with sweet, sweet vengeance.” 

Her eyes cut through Sasha, cut into the darkest room of her soul, where the Not-Them’s guts and hair lie in heaps. Sasha looks away, bows her head. 

“I’m...I’m sorry?” Jon says. He’s quiet about it, tentative, and Sasha frankly isn’t sure how she feels either. 

“Oh, Archivist,” says Helen, not taking her eyes off of Sasha. “Why didn’t you tell me she was so sweet? Don’t worry, Sasha. I am now what I’ve always been. To give me a name, see me with a face...it’s like looking at a sunset through a cheap camera...” 

Helen trails off, her voice curling into a question mark. She’s reasoning herself out as she speaks, testing identity’s fragile boundaries. There’s a shuddering disconnect in her eyes between the woman she was and the blighted pocket of the universe she is becoming. Sasha aches at the over-familiar sight of it, turns to Jon instead.

“What happened to _you_?” she asks. 

His chuckle quickly turns into a cough. Finally, he manages: “It’s been a rough few days.” 

***

Sasha has developed what could charitably be called a strange relationship with fear. Anything, even uncomfortable things, can become familiar if sustained. She’s used to the drop of shock in the pit of her stomach; the undefinable sense of incomprehensible doom wherever her patron has taken nooks and crannies of the mortal world; the cold, numb terror that she’ll forget who she was. 

This fear is different. 

Jon sits across from her, explaining in terribly blunt, unaffected tones that he’d been kidnapped. His voice goes hoarser and hoarser as he speaks, and finally Martin visibly winces and ever-so-slightly nudges a mug of chamomile towards Jon’s sharp elbow. There’s something in that gesture Sasha can’t place or name, something too trusting for her to entirely process. 

That gesture, that’s what frightens her, because everything Sasha’s ever seen of the dread entities tells her this: whenever there is something dear, there is something to be taken away. 

And yet here Sasha’s friends sit; tired, frayed, frightened, but still willing to fight something they hardly understand. Distracted scholars, unassuming researchers, people just getting by who never, not in their wildest dreams, not in their cruelest nightmares, expected they’d be called upon to save the world. 

This fear calls her name quietly, asking cruel little rhetorical questions. _What if somebody does not return?_ it whispers. _How will Martin look at Jon’s empty desk if he leaves work one of these days and never comes back?_ When the fear begins asking _Who’ll be sacrificed this time? Who’ll be left behind like Michael Shelley?_ a chill crawls up Sasha’s spine and refuses to dislodge itself from the back of her neck. 

Gesturing emphatically with his good hand, Jon weaves a tale of wax figures and living mannequins, clowns dancing in stolen skin, a ritual meant to reshape the world. In her mind’s eye, Sasha sees Sannikov Land; sees Michael Shelley falling backwards into nothing, forsaken; sees Gertrude turning her back. 

_Is that how this works?_ Sasha wonders. _An innocent life in exchange for the world? Over and over until only bones are left, until Elias digs up a few more oblivious young library scientists to rehash all the horrible lessons their predecessors died to learn?_

As she listens to Jon speak, Sasha can’t banish her uneasiness; can’t override the sense that stopping the Unknowing won’t demand anything less than blood. 

***

Planning and waiting, worrying and watching. Trying to stay out of the reach of Elias’s seeming omnipotence; gathering as much information as they can before it’s time to face the Stranger. Moments flow like river water, and soon enough Sasha is wandering down a familiar stretch of the tunnels when she feels something in the air -- crackling lost-at-night panic, a lurching sense of disorientation. She peers suspiciously at the solid walls.

“Helen?” she asks the silence around her. 

Sure enough, a second later, a pale yellow door flickers into being several meters ahead. As it swings open, its audible creak resonates at once homelike and alien. 

“Hello, Sasha,” the Distortion’s new form says, her voice a minor-key melody. “Do you have a second?” 

Helen is a creature of unholy geometry, the suggestion of a human silhouette evoked in tangled shapes and lines, her hands curled like young ferns. There’s something slumped and dejected about the way she holds herself, the way her fingers wrap tentatively around the side of the door. 

“Is something wrong?” asks Sasha, as if she doesn’t know exactly how wrong Helen must feel, how her bones must shock and burn like living electricity, how her mind must feel like a broken panel of stained glass. 

“I don’t know where else to go,” says Helen. She isn’t looking at Sasha, won’t meet her eyes. “Helen liked the Archivist, but...let’s just say he made it very clear that he doesn’t want to see _me_.” 

“Well, Jon’s been through some--” 

“Yes, I know,” says Helen, impatient. “I shouldn’t have asked him, but I’m just-- I need help. From someone who understands.”

“Understands what?” 

“Becoming something like this.” Helen tilts her head a little to the side, just uncanny enough that Sasha can’t help but be reminded of Michael. “Like us.” 

“Why didn’t you just come to me?” 

“I was…afraid. Of what you might tell me.” 

“Alright,” Sasha says quietly, “alright. Well. You can talk to me, if you want, and I’ll try not to...I’ll try to help. What’s the matter?” 

Helen sighs aloud and Sasha smiles, small and bittersweet. She remembers what it was like to keep breathing out of habit alone.

“I lost something when I...when I became Helen,” she begins. “It wasn’t the right time, or there never _was_ a right time, or-- _something’s_ not right. I...I took someone, and it’s never felt _wrong_ before, not like that. Nothing fits, and it-- Sasha, it _hurts_.” She looks up now, her strange, dancing eyes gone wild and mournful and afraid. 

“Helen--” Sasha says softly, stepping forward, and the Distortion flinches back. “May I call you Helen?” 

“I don’t know what else you would call me.”

“Okay. Helen. Can I show you something?” 

“I suppose?” 

“Take my hand,” Sasha says. 

“What?” 

“Just...humor me. I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Of course. You wouldn’t dare,” snips Helen, but she reaches out anyway. 

It is an accursed and dreadful thing, the joining of two hands that aren’t. Wretched fingers weave together, finding their counterparts in bones where bones should not be, in cold skin and knuckles that slice like blades. 

“This might be the part you were afraid of. I’m going to say some things. Is that okay?” Sasha asks.

Helen nods mutely, pressing lips that are not lips together. 

“We’re a living horror story, Helen. I’m not going to tell you it isn’t awful. I’m not going to tell you you should feel better. The Distortion was never supposed to have a face. These tunnels were never supposed to have a body. Of course it hurts.” Sasha pauses and takes a deep breath she doesn’t really need. “But look.” 

A spidery, familiar pattern begins to lace its way up Helen’s arm; unreasonable angles and miragelike colors. 

“What are you--” 

“There are beautiful things too,” says Sasha, and the hallway around them begins to glow, lit from beneath as luminescent Lichtenberg figures etch their way from the floor through the still, musty air to meet their hands. 

“Why are you being like this? Being...kind?” asks Helen, trepidatious, a glimmering paradox reflected in her eyes. 

“Because nothing makes sense anyways. Fuck our _nature_. Fuck our divine mandate to terrify and kill or-- or whatever. _Fuck it._ ” 

“Sasha…” 

“Helen,” she says, and reality flutters around them like butterflies’ wings. “ _There can be beautiful things too_.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Plot who? I only know my faves talking about their feelings :0  
> Special thanks to my fearless beta reader @key_exchange <3


	7. Will and Testament

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An attempt to save the world has unexpected consequences.

To say that the plan is deceptively simple might be giving them a little too much credit. It’s more like...just simple. Simple enough to be effective; simple enough to fall apart. 

“Fewer moving parts,” says Basira, who’s quickly joined the small number of people who’ll look directly at Sasha; she does it like she’s proving a point. “Less can go wrong.” 

“Yeah, but if one thing goes wrong, it all goes to hell,” says Melanie, resting a muddy Doc Marten on her desk and sounding a little too cheerful. 

“Wait a second. Wait a minute. You’re telling me that _this_ isn’t hell?” asks Tim sarcastically, gesturing at the shelves around him, and Melanie gives a short, sharp laugh. The two of them have developed something of a rapport, bonding over their bottomless hatred for the Institute and its management. They’ve earned their anger, Sasha figures. Between the two of them, they’ve got enough desire for revenge to consume several lifetimes. 

Meanwhile, nobody’s told Daisy about Sasha -- they suspect that the instinct that drove her to nearly kill Jon would stir up trouble if she found out that they were essentially hiding an avatar of the Spiral in their basement. The tension in the Archives is already thick enough to cut with a knife, and Sasha would rather avoid that particular fight. 

A few weeks staring down the barrel of the apocalypse has left everyone worse for wear. Despite her stoic demeanor, Basira’s nails are bitten ragged; Martin continually nods off over his desk, plagued by one too many sleepless nights; Jon keeps going wide-eyed and frozen and nobody’s got any idea what’s running through his head but everyone can see it’s nothing good. Since they learned about the Unknowing, they’ve all been scouring books for some elaborate counterritual.

Until Jon returns from abroad, dressed even more haphazardly than usual, looking hungry and hollow. When he announces in shatteringly casual tones that he was kidnapped _again_ , Martin’s so driven to distraction that he shatters a mug of hot tea on the kitchenette’s tiled floor. Jon thinks he knows when and where the ritual’s going to happen, and when he tells them that blowing the Great Yarmouth House of Wax to smithereens with explosives is the only thing he knows how to do, they take him at his word. 

They work over the plan with racing hearts and sweaty palms, their furious determination doubling when Elias sneers at their methods’ simplicity. 

They’ve spent the last several weeks arriving at an unpleasant understanding that the enigmatic head of the Institute is able to observe them without their knowledge, knows them without having been told. According to Jon, though, he can’t see into the tunnels; he can’t see what lurks beneath their feet. Occasionally, someone casts a glance down at the open trapdoor, where, at random times of the day and night, the passageways underneath swim with strange, dancing light. 

Taking advantage of Elias’s rare blind spot is probably for the best, because every day Sasha’s power grows. There are very few shapes she cannot rearrange herself into; very few lies she cannot make people believe if she tries. Tim sits on the trapdoor ladder, whispering _w_ _hat if he can see you?_ , whispering _w_ _hat if you’re in danger?_

“He doesn’t scare me,” quips Sasha, what she means is _I fear Beholding, but its servants are just skin and bones_ ; what she means is _I am an optical illusion, and no Eye can look upon me without being deceived._

***

Sasha cannot go with them to Great Yarmouth. She is not sure whether she can leave the tunnels or for how long, and she refuses to be a liability in a situation this delicate. She knows it’s the right decision. She knows it’s for the best. 

But the nameless, ageless fear of loss swirls around her, choking. She reminds herself that Martin and Melanie are staying behind; reminds herself that it’s not rational to try to intervene; reminds herself that she has to stay out of it if she doesn’t want to end up confronting Elias and more than likely creating yet another huge problem. 

_But it’s always been Jon who needs protecting_ , she thinks. _But it’s Tim who doesn’t deserve to lose anything else at the Stranger’s hands._

The constant grinding worry of it drains her energy; the low-grade caffeine headache she’s had for the last several weeks worsens daily. She fights down a ravenous hunter’s instinct, painstakingly talking herself out of beckoning lost administrative interns into the tunnels to wander eternally. Sasha knows she’s not human, but there are some things she’s not ready to forsake. 

***

The day before they leave for Great Yarmouth, Jon asks for her statement. 

“Last will and testament, more like,” Tim says from the hallway, recklessness flickering flamelike in his voice, and Jon glares. 

“You don’t have to, if you don’t--” 

“No, I’ll do it,” Sasha says. 

“Whenever you’re ready,” her old friend says wearily, looking jittery and unsteady, nervously fiddling with the gauze wrapped around his right hand and wincing when he nudges the wound hidden beneath. “So they’ll know what happened if this-- if we don’t...well. Just in case.”

***

Alone in the tunnels, Sasha presses a button down on an old-fashioned tape recorder and closes her eyes, spending a moment lost in its faint click-and-whir, lost in the weight of Beholding lurking somewhere behind her, lost in nostalgia and fear. 

Then she opens her eyes and begins to speak. 

_Statement of the tunnels underneath the Magnus Institute and their...their spokesperson, Sasha James. Taken direct from subject, sixth of August, 2017. Statement begins._

_Wow. This feels weird._

_Don’t take this the wrong way; I’m not after your job. I don’t even think I could_ do _your job, actually, given my-- my...situation. But you know I applied to be Head Archivist, right? Wrote a cover letter and everything, even though I’d been working here for the last -- how long was it? I...I’m not so good with time anymore._

_But...no. Elias must’ve figured I knew too much or something. Or maybe he saw the Spiral in me. Even then, even before all this. Do you think he did, Jon?_

_Do you think_ you _saw it?_

_Okay, no, that’s not-- that’s not on topic._

_What I’m trying to say is -- huh. I wonder if Jon will ever actually listen to these. I’m honestly not sure if this thing can even record my voice. I...ugh. Alright._

_What I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry it had to be you, Jon. Really. I’m so, so sorry. At least I had some kind of idea about what this place was, what being the Archivist meant. You didn’t know what you’d agreed to until it was too late. It’s not easy, becoming something you don’t understand. I guess I have an idea of what that’s been like._

_Okay. Let me end this here. Look, I know I’ve lost a lot. I mean, I’m not even sure what I mean when I say “I” anymore. I was somebody and now I’m some_ thing _. I didn’t choose this any more than you did._

_But I can choose to help._

_I can’t choose to be human, or to be a good person, or to speak without frightening people, but I can choose to help._

_You come back safe to us. Tell Tim he’d better be safe too or I’m going to have to...avenge him or something. And I’m getting pretty tired of chasing after vengeance._

_I think that’s all. Statement ends._

***

The knowledge comes to her crushing and confusing, nauseating and absolute, considerably more intense than it had on that dark February night when she’d been drawn to face her double in the depths below the Institute. The panopticon hidden in her spidery silver scars freezes like a liquid nitrogen burn. _Something is going wrong. Something is going wrong. Something is going wrong._

This time, she has no door. This time, there is nothing she can do. 

Sasha remembers her own near-death and her gut twists. _I will not be there in time_ , she thinks. If she could, maybe she could save them the way Michael had saved her. Maybe she knew how to be gentler; maybe they wouldn’t have to change the way she’d had to. 

She paces between dimensions, slipping in and out of sight, her hands unconsciously wringing themselves, fingers moving like a spider’s legs. She clenches teeth that buzz like radio static. _If only I could reach them_ , Sasha thinks, _if only I could’ve done something, anything.._. The regret of it feels like a sudden drop in altitude, pressure in her ears, an apocalyptic tightness around her ribs. 

In her panic, Sasha nearly does not notice the sound of hinges creaking behind her. 

***

That peculiar door standing alone where it shouldn’t exist is usually an evil omen, the last thing someone sees before stepping into a world of eternal wandering, eternal terror. But today, perhaps for the first time in its frightful existence, the door’s appearance seems to be a miracle. 

“Helen!” Sasha yells, her knifelike fingers gnashing against sunny yellow paneling in a scrabbling semblance of a knock. 

“It’s usually me who knocks,” says Helen, half-muffled behind the door as it swings open. She stares at the ragged-edged vision before her and tilts her head. It isn’t that she looks _concerned_ , not exactly, but in her scattered form there is a soft understanding that something is not right. “What’s going on?” 

Words pile up like crashed cars in Sasha’s throat. “I need a favor,” she finally manages. “Please.” 

Helen’s gaze traces the luminous blueprint-scar as it winds up Sasha’s hand and disappears under her shirt collar, studies the way Sasha holds her body like a handful of broken glass. When she looks back up, Helen’s face is an abstract painter’s conceptual rendering of sympathy. 

“Where do you need to go?” 

***

Oh, no, no, no. 

This place is the antithesis of all that is known or thought, all that is understood or misunderstood or consciously perceived at all. It is dark here, dark and loud, stifling like an overfirm embrace, like the inside of a parked car left sitting outside on an August afternoon, like the chamber of a torn lung weeping plasma and blood

and a calliope is p

a calliope is playing

a calliope is playing and it sounds like heart palpitations like the wet slice of parted skin, like the end of the world

A voi

A voice behind her 

Calls a na

Calls her name?

_Sasha_! calls a voice behind her. 

She hears it as if someone is whispering to her over grinding bass in the front row at a concert, but she’s too distracted by how the scene before her spills into her eyes, filthy, slimy, wrong like spilled oil blossoming through water to obscure the seabed, like clarity lost, like the Not-Them flaying her skin from bones and wearing it to dance the world into its grave--

She hears it and looks up--

She hears it and cannot look away from Nikola Orsinov dancing in what looks like--

_Sasha_ _!_ it calls again.

She knows that voice; she swears she does, she swears it’s familiar, but her thoughts are dissolving when they come to mind like snow hitting pavement and she says-- 

_Michael?_

_Not anymore_ , the voice responds, and she doesn’t remember the Distortion ever sounding soft like that, resonating hurt and melancholic like that. It’s enough to divert her attention away from the chaotic whirlpool of waxen limbs and disembodied skin around her, enough to cool her burning eyes. _Snap out of it_ , the voice says. _We have a job to do_.

***

As a rule, Sasha does not call on the dread powers. She does not inquire, plead, demand, or pray. The Spiral will come to her on its own time -- and generally, to be honest, she’d prefer if it didn’t. She does not ask for sustenance, she does not ask forgiveness, she does not ask for help. 

But as she looks out at the sea of limbs thrashing in their nihilistic dance before her, hears those intoxicating chords scrabbling at the inside of her skull, watches the Circus revel in the garish costumery of its apparent victory, the Spiral’s cold madness crawls up her arms and falls from her eyes like tears, sweet as water in the desert, cutting through the suffocating swirl of sloughed-off skin like a rapier. 

Sasha closes her eyes and sees dancing patterns extending indefinitely, swirling deliriously into one another, locking hands and breaking apart, flickering and blurring and glowing in indescribable colors. Her heart is pounding out of time with the calliope and her bones feel coiled with a tension both cruel and lovely and she is very, very aware of the music around her; of Helen’s cold, sharp fingers spreading across her shoulder, of the name she wears and the face she intends to keep. 

The last creeping tendrils of the Stranger’s power fall away like vines cut at the root, and it’s not magic, not some mystical influence that does it; it’s not even Helen, not even the memory, sharp enough to gut a fish, that they're trying to stop the end of the world.

It is the sight of Jon unconscious on the floor while Tim stands over him, holding a detonator. 

***

And so Sasha becomes a category error in space-time; a glitch rippling in rainbow shades, an illusion sliding effortlessly underneath the fabric of reality-- 

And so one by one, members of the wretched stretched-skin choir fall listless and limp, decapitated or hamstrung by hands like garrottes and Sasha drinks deep from their confusion, their horror, their dread-struck realization-- 

And so she hacks her way towards those two too-vulnerable, too-human figures and her plastic victims fall like lightning-struck trees around her, neon-bright Lichtenberg figures sizzling up their stolen legs until the air reeks of wax and charred viscera-- 

“Get them through the door,” Helen whispers in her ear, the eerie weight of her hand disappearing from Sasha’s shoulder. 

And then the Spiral is sweeping over her in forever-expanding tendrils and waves, in opalescent light and unspeakable majesty and a button is being pressed and a doorway is opening in the floor as the world caves in around them-- 

***

Time is irrelevant because the Spiral pays it no respect. This instant stretches onward, crawling towards eternity at a snail's pace because the Twisting Deceit wills it to be so. 

Sasha walks through a frozen landscape of fire and shrapnel and ash, great heaps of rubble frozen in midair. Distantly, she watches Helen reach up to where Jon lies crumpled, pulling him through the door. The shadows spill fractals and Sasha reaches out, but Tim does not look up. 

“Come on,” Sasha says urgently, and her voice echoes melodic through the detritus of impending ruin.

He doesn’t move. 

“None of this is real,” Tim says, his voice half dreamlike and utterly lost. 

“Please trust me,” she says, and the break in her voice nearly vanishes in a clattering cacophony as a slab of concrete crashes to the ground behind her. The Spiral’s power runs through her body like adrenaline, like lightning, like blood, but an earthbound creature can only do so much; already a shaking, feverish sort of exhaustion is closing around Sasha like a vice. “We don’t have much time.”

“I don’t think I…” 

“ _Please_.” 

“Liar,” he says, and for the first time in a long time, his voice is more sad than angry. “I know you aren’t really here.” 

“I’m not going to leave you,” she says, and the map traversing her right arm throbs like an open wound as she searches for his hand. Fire is pressing close around them now. Shards of metal and glass shiver in the air, fighting against the hand that restrains them from burrowing deep into someone’s flesh. 

Tim stares at the hand extended towards him like the reaching branches of an ancient, gnarled tree, and a layer of fog seems to clear. Finally, finally, _finally_ he looks up, meets her eyes. 

“ _Sasha?_ ” 

“Hurry,” she chokes, the weight of stalled time beginning to claw at her in earnest now, splitting her nightmare-woven form limb from limb, particle from particle. 

Caught up in recognition and the swirl of dust around them, he nods.

She yanks his hand and they topple through the door. 

***

“Sasha. _Sasha._ Can you hear me?” 

The first voice she hears is frosty and multilayered, curling in on itself like the edges of old parchment paper.

“What’s wrong? Why isn’t she breathing?” 

Relief breaks over her like thawing ice: it’s Tim’s voice, afraid but not horror-struck, exhausted but not dead, warm and human and _alive_. 

“She doesn’t need to breathe,” Helen snaps. 

“How the ever-living _hell_ doesn’t she need to _breathe_?” 

“She just doesn’t. It’s not like that.” Oddly, the impatience in Helen’s voice isn’t dangerous. If Sasha isn’t completely mistaken, it’s almost understanding. 

“She’s hurt, though -- she must be. This isn’t-- her arm shouldn’t--”

“Don’t worry about me,” Sasha says. “You’re the one who nearly died in an--” 

Her voice tapers off when she realizes she isn’t actually speaking aloud. With an effort that makes her grind her teeth like chalk rasping against a blackboard, Sasha drags her mind back into her body. The chaos she finds there is beyond even her comprehension, and she can’t muster much more than a slight, involuntary gasp. 

“Sasha! Can you hear me?” 

She can’t begin to imagine what kind of effort it would take to nod. 

“Helen, goddamnit. What do I _do_?” 

“I don’t know,” she says, and an odd note of desperation peeks out from under that cold, fractured voice. “I don’t know what’s wrong with the Archivist, either.” 

“ _What_?” Sasha tries, but she’s beginning to feel the problem now. From hand to shoulder blade, her right side is splitting apart at the seams, unraveling down the map’s lines. Something flickers like lightning in the growing gaps. Her body is a collapsed mine; the blueprint’s unearthly angles brim with dust and fractured stone. Something old and powerful and broken reaches with trembling hands, grasping at an unattainable crown. Destruction reigns and Smirke’s vision collapses and there is nothing left in her but a vast closing eye. The pain of it defies all conscious thought, rational or irrational. 

“The tunnels--” Sasha manages, and the world around her tilts, then darkens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are, folks - in the home stretch at last! Thanks for bearing with my increasingly flamboyant formatting on this one.  
> As always, big gratitude goes out to you for reading and to my marvelous beta reader @key_exchange for preventing at least 63% of my potential comma-related misdemeanors.


	8. What Lies Beneath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things fall into place.

Later, no one can explain what caused the earthquake. 

It only really affects a few blocks, sending mugs toppling off of shelves and precariously-perched houseplants plunging to their demises. Seismic events are rare enough in the greater London area that most people assume it was some kind of explosion or main break, but the Fire Brigade finds no corresponding evidence. 

What they _do_ find are the caved-in remains of what looks like a series of adjoined sub-basements: a structure far larger than anybody expected to be lurking under that part of the city, extending much deeper belowground than it should. Bit of a safety hazard, really. After a virulently passive-aggressive email exchange regarding budgeting and new development, officials bring in an architectural historian to confirm that what’s been uncovered are the fossilized remains of Millbank Prison. Accidentally digging up architecture from the days of yore isn’t too uncommon, but the structure’s state of ruin makes preservationists shake their heads and sigh. _Nothing could’ve survived_ , they say. 

Some time later, search and rescue teams do find human remains, but it’s a strange thing -- testing shows that the unfortunate lost soul had been dead and rotting belowground for over a hundred and fifty years. It’s nothing but broken bones now anyhow, barely recognizable as such without a forensic scientist’s keen eye. _Nothing could’ve survived_ , they say. 

Not even gamblers seated at immortality’s poker table; not even ghosts. 

There’s only one building seriously damaged. Considering its marble pillars and wide windows, it may once have been quite venerable before surrendering to mossiness and mild decrepitude. It’s intact but crooked, and passersby can’t help but think that something in its shaken, ivy-covered facade conveys the disconsolate air of a widow in her mourning veil. 

The only known casualty turns up in that building, though he isn’t even a direct victim of the earthquake. The head of the Magnus Institute, Elias Bouchard, is found in his office, slumped over a meticulously organized pile of donor request forms, dead of what coroners, at a loss, will finally call “natural causes.” 

First responders operating under Section 31, though, murmur to each other that he’d been bleeding rather badly from the eyes. 

***

While they search and scramble in London, all is quiet horror behind reality’s heavy curtains, where the Twisting Deceit lurks in velvet darkness. 

It watches, waits, whispers to its fallen servant in tongues unknown. 

***

_Sasha wanders through her old house, that gentle-faced Victorian near Finsbury Park. It is exactly as she remembers it, down to the detail, so perfectly familiar that something about it feels uncanny._

_Looking out through the warped window, she finds everything just slightly to the side of the way it ought to be, oozing hypnotic patterns at the edges, and she knows that this is not a place but the belly of the beast; that everything she sees is the Spiral, not the world she knew._

_“You made me for a reason,” she says aloud, knowing it will hear. “Why?”_

***

_She walks down the hallway to the office that was once hers; the one Melanie now resentfully occupies. It does not smell right, not like ink or dust or old coffee. It smells metallic, sweet, all blood and honey. The distant door slams shut, and Sasha’s eyes twinge with an odd sort of phantom pain. When she raises her hands to them she finds the sockets empty, her face hollow as a mask._

_She can still see, though -- she must be able to. How else would she know, as she passes the familiar portraits of old heads of the Institute, that each painted pair of eyes has been violently scratched out?_

_Another place that isn’t a place. Another trap, another lair, another salivating mouth built to look like something she remembers._

_When she stumbles backward she falls, down, down, down._

*******

_A door swings open and many long hands reach out to Sasha; her gaze jumps between Michael’s blond hair and Helen’s luminous eyes._

_“I was never meant to be a person,” says the Distortion. “Their impulses are so distracting.”_

_Sasha waits patiently for it to get to its point._

_“There are some things one cannot forget,” it says, its many-layered voice a choir of the damned._

_“Helen could not forget who she’d once been,” says Helen’s voice, laden with electric inflection, the sonic manifestation of a shiver up Sasha’s spine._

_“And Michael could not forget the Archivist’s betrayal,” says Michael’s voice, dissonant and kaleidoscopic, stinging like a paper cut._

_The many-limbed abomination before her does something like tilting its heads._

_“But they did not choose you._ I _chose you,” says the Distortion, in unison with itself once more. It speaks like faraway bells, like desperate screaming, like cultists chanting passages meant to raise the dead. “Someone who could blind the Eye with its own reflection. My little optical illusion.”_

_Sasha stares, shaken, uncomprehending. “But why?”_

_“A move in some never-ending chess game? Perhaps. Balance, maybe. Who knows why the dread gods do what they do? Who can say how much we choose, where our hands are forced or free? We only know....”_

_“What?”_

_“That you were taken on purpose,” the Distortion says, closed eyes dripping oversaturated neon tears._

_“Forged in the crucible,” the Distortion says, and one of its hands dances up to smooth a strand of hair behind Sasha’s ear._

_“Wrought to undo a god,” the Distortion says, and two more hands gently press themselves over her empty eyes._

*******

_She floats ghostlike through the destroyed tunnels, registering their absence in jagged edges under her skin, panes of glass fractured where stones have been thrown through. She doesn’t know if she is alive. She doesn’t know if this is something she is allowed to survive. In front of her stands a wide, familiar antique mirror, gray and inert, ignoring Sasha’s reflection, throwing nothing back to her but rubble._

_Smirke’s architecture. The Panopticon. There was a place of power here, something she was never supposed to meddle with. That’s what the Distortion meant, she realizes -- that was her part in the chess game. To win control over the tunnels, to destroy them, to compromise the Eye._

_Or not. She’ll never know, will she? Not in any way she can comprehend._

_Instead, she lets herself be afraid for those she’s left behind. Instead, she thinks of every choice she has made since the Spiral took her, reciting motives to herself like a half-forgotten prayer._

_For that is the trouble between wrathful gods and their human vassals, that is the flaw in those twisting routes down which the entities attempt to nudge their heedless accomplices: to fear is powerful, yes, but to love, to grieve, to hate, to care -- these things are not taken away so easily._

_As she reaches out to touch the mirror before her, someone else’s reflection swims into being. In the mirror, the Distortion’s eyes are a bottomless brown, warm as caramel and very nearly human._

_***_

**** _“So what now?” Sasha asks the Spiral, feeling its presence surrounding her, highlighting her confusion and her doubt in vivid hues, crackling electric and malevolent and strange. “What happens next?”_

_“It’s time to wake up,” says a familiar voice as if in answer, static-filled and soothing as cool water on a burn._

***

When Sasha opens her eyes, it’s an infinite instant between then and forever. She peers cautiously through half-closed lids, expecting the light to hurt. It does. It claws at her with overwhelming clarity, with a rationality that almost alienates. She curls half-numb fingers around the warm hand she can feel resting over her own. 

“What’s going on?” she croaks, wincing as she becomes conscious of a stiff, disjointed, all-consuming ache which indicates that she’s managed to sprain every joint in the right side of her body. 

In response, there’s a gentle clamor as the vigil-keepers pass news from hand to hand like a priceless jewel, like an embrace: rapidfire words spoken into phones; Tim’s exhausted half-sob; to her relief, Jon’s familiar half-exasperated sigh of relief. The voices buzzing around Sasha create a tender familiarity too flawed to be false, for there is still the Spiral’s frenetic static, there is still the Eye’s quiet omniscience. 

“The world didn’t end?” Sasha croaks, and there’s a smattering of soft, relieved laughter. 

“Not yet,” says Helen, and the words sparkle and burn like champagne. 

“Not yet,” Sasha agrees, her voice a bridge between raspy humanity and hallucinatory disarray as she lifts hesitant eyelids, letting reality shift back into focus; blinking wide-eyed into her own salvaged slice of creation. “Not yet.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apocalypse who? we only wax emotional about the power of friendship and agency in this town.  
> Heartfelt thanks to you and to my wily and wonderful beta reader @key_exchange, who deserves the legion d'honneur and also possibly a knighthood. Stay tuned for the epilogue. <3


	9. Epilogue

Out there, somewhere, is the world that should’ve been. 

Sasha should’ve woken up this morning to London grey outside the warped panes of her window. She should’ve stood on the train and argued with herself about whether it’d be worth it to stop at Costa for a mocha, given the dismal drizzle, given the fact that she’d gone to bed an hour and a half too late. _Yes_ , she’d decide. She’d stand in the queue and think _I really ought to get tea for Martin,_ and then notice that they’ve started bringing in the ridiculous seasonal drinks she finds disgusting but Tim thinks are genuinely excellent, and, _well,_ she’d better grab black coffee for Jon or that’s just being rude. _Sasha, angel, star of my heart, love of my life,_ Tim would say effusively when she set the drink on the least messy corner of his desk. Work would be, well, boring. Nothing to remark on, really. Nothing would be watching, nothing would be lurking in the walls, and she’d keep her resume updated in case she wanted to move on. No tunnels, no strange tables, and certainly no doors where there shouldn’t have been any to begin with.

This is not that world. 

In this world, Sasha leans on Tim's arm as she stands above the trapdoor, looking down into the dusty ruins beneath. Is she really so different now from who she might’ve been? Besides the silvery pattern that rests quietly on her right arm, unmoving and plain like the scar it’s always been, besides the strange swirl of her hair and the writhing illusions hidden behind the sunglasses she’s wearing, she could almost be that person. 

The Institute’s windows are darkened, its doors blocked off with yellow caution tape. Even Jon, who’d woken up two days after the Unknowing to an awful headache and the surprising realization that he’d become nearsighted again after months of no longer needing his glasses, hasn’t been here in weeks. He’s been living at Martin’s for the last while, letting the occasional batches of food he’s got a habit of stress-cooking burn on the stove while he reads endless books and revels in the fact that he can no longer intuit their endings. To Sasha’s knowledge, nobody else has come by: she’s certain Melanie will never step foot within several blocks’ radius of this place again, and Daisy and Basira have gone off traveling. The rest of the staff has been evacuated; the silence and the dust tells her that she is the only being who has walked these halls in quite some time. The unmistakable feeling of being watched, though not absent, has faded.

“Is it alright? Being here?” asks Tim.

“For crying out loud,” drawls Helen, leaning out of her door from Sasha’s right. “If anyone’s a damsel in distress here, it’s you. Of course it’s alright.” She pauses for a moment, then turns to Sasha. “It _is_ alright, isn’t it?” she says in an undertone. 

Sasha nods, letting a small smile wind across her face. For two individuals more than capable of wielding words as blunt-force weapons, Tim and Helen’s bickering has become remarkably benign. Sasha entertains a faint suspicion that the two of them begrudgingly coexist because each knows that the other is important to her. 

There will come a time when the energy Sasha took from the Stranger’s acolytes runs out; when each hour becomes one more chess match between her rules and the Spiral’s hunger. _It will chip away at you until you learn to feed it_ , Sasha remembers. She thinks of rituals yet to be attempted, malevolent creatures dreaming up new apocalypses. _There are worse things than an eye for an eye_ , she thinks. _There are worse things than taking from those who seek to hurt._

The last two years’ heartbreak and horror has paved them all an uphill road. Every day reveals some new challenge, an old pang of grief, the breathless terror that falls thick and heavy over Sasha’s eyes when she’s sure she’s forsaken something of herself she’ll never even be able to comprehend again. She and her friends are altered and tired, torn asunder and sewn back together one too many times; traumatized, dejected, afraid. Afraid, but hopeful, too. Afraid, but arm-in arm, still standing. Not okay, but alive. Broken, but willing to rebuild. 

Sasha raises her hands over the rubble; watches as, seemingly of their own accord, stones begin to shift. Her skin crawls as a tiny section of the map shudders back to life, as scar tissue begins a slow, painstaking rearrangement. 

“Not exactly going for balance, are you?” says Tim, watching the first new tunnel dance spiral off into murky darkness.

“Who do you think I am, Robert Smirke?” 

“He’s a master of subtle--” 

“--of subtle stability, yeah, yeah--” 

“--he had the right idea! Imagine if we could balance the powers, like, _really_ balance them--”

“Subtlety? Stability? So he picked the two most boring things?” says Helen, tangling the first two words into polysyllabic loops and knots. For all her talk, though, there _is_ a soft subtlety in the way Helen watches out for Sasha -- something stronger, headier, stranger than simple alliance. “Don’t listen to him, Sasha, darling.” 

“I’m not going to listen to either of you,” Sasha says, stepping down the ladder, half-kidding. “This is my house.”

And maybe there was never any world but this one, the one where Sasha and Tim have fallen back into their old, familiar pattern of talking over one another like river water over rocks, the one where Helen smiles wide and ghoulish as Sasha’s next gesture sends a pile of fallen bricks clambering over each other, stitching themselves into a stretch of wall the perfect size and shape for a new doorway. 

And maybe there was never any world but this one, where the tunnel walls light themselves lantern-like at Sasha’s behest; glowing, opalescent veins creeping over the stone in frenzied swirls, quietly contradictory as they spill over bricks laid in service to the Eye; a world where alien and grotesque things can be beautiful, can be gentle, can even, perhaps, be good. 

And maybe there was never any world but this one, the one under Sasha’s protection, the one which has been so cruel, the one which has been so kind. The one where every morning is hard-won and bitter-edged and blossoming with a tentative, redemptive sort of hope. A place so often smothered in darkness, so often mired in terror, so often frozen in place with that wrenching fear which comes with being lost. A place she intends to defend for as long as she is capable of choosing to do so. 

Because Sasha is not lost. Not anymore. 

She reaches forward and carves a path. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for reading!! Putting my writing up on public platforms is a pretty new thing for me, and I can't possibly emphasize enough how encouraging your feedback has been. To everyone who left comments, gave kudos, or simply stopped by, my appreciation for you is the approximate size and shape of the entire continent of Antarctica!  
> Massive thanks go out to you for coming with me on this wild ride and, of course, to my fabulous beta reader @key_exchange, who blesses the world by using their copious powers for good and not (yet) for evil.  
> Catch you on the flip side. <3


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